Can Facebook Predict Who Wins the Senate in 2014?

What can Facebook candidate likes and page engagement metrics tell us about the likely outcome of 2014 Senate races? If the 2012 results and the 2013 New Jersey Senate campaign are any guide, the answer is a whole lot.

Social networks have changed the landscape of campaigns and elections. During the 2010 election, political scientist James Fowler conducted a get-out-the-vote experiment with Facebook on Election Day. Fowler found that Facebookers delivered 61 million get-out-the-vote messages that he estimated increased voter turnout by 340,000.

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Last year, in a post-election analysis in Politico, we reported that eight out of nine toss-up Senate races were won by the candidate with the more engaged Facebook fan base. And in the 2012 House elections, 20 of the 33 most competitive races across the country were won by the candidate with a measurable Facebook fan engagement advantage.

The correlation between growing fan base, higher fan engagement and victory on Election Day led us to ask this question: Are Facebook metrics a crystal ball that can be used to predict election outcomes?

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In 2012, our Facebook Forecasting Model accurately predicted the winner in eight of the nine Senate toss-up races studied. Back-testing our forecasting model in Senate races over the last nine weeks of the 2012 election and comparing our results against 212 published polls, we found that the model, which incorporates readily available fan and engagement numbers with past electoral history tabulated by the Cook Report, did a better job of projecting actual election returns than polling in four of the weeks studied, and just as well in another week. A follow-up test run in the 2013 special New Jersey Senate race, using Facebook data the week before the election, forecasted a 55.04 percent to 44.96 percent Booker victory—very close to the actual Election Day results.

Our model is based on a set of simple assumptions that combine certain statistics tracked by Facebook, which we believe measure campaign effectiveness, with basic electoral fundamentals, such as organizational and communication capacity, to forecast the results of congressional campaigns. We estimate campaign effectiveness using three variables. First, the growth of a candidate’s fan base—or the number of people who “like” a candidate’s fan page—over time. Second, the growth or contraction of the number of people Facebook reports are “engaged” with the campaign, meaning those who comment, like or share posts about the candidate with their Facebook friends. And third, the campaign’s actual success in mobilizing people at a particular time— a simple equation of those engaged divided by the fan base. We measure these variables regularly and combine them to produce a rolling estimate of campaign effectiveness that, when combined with campaign fundamentals, produces a vote percentage forecast for each race.

So what does our Facebook crystal ball have to say about the 2014 Senate general-election contests?